83 minutes / Color
Closed Captioned
Release: 2026
Copyright: 2025
“For most of my adult life,” director Lynne Sachs writes, “I’ve collected business cards strangers have pulled from their wallets and placed in my hand. I sometimes remember the precise moment they were offered to me, other times they are a mystery.”
In EVERY CONTACT LEAVES A TRACE, Sachs shuffles and sorts her hundreds of cards, chooses seven, and decides to contact their owners and film their encounters. What follows is a years-long journey to trace the imprint left by Sachs’s contact with these people — including her hairstylist, a Chinese filmmaker and festival programmer, her former therapist, and a textile artist whose designs inspire the illustrations and animations that punctuate the film.
But EVERY CONTACT LEAVES A TRACE is not a “where are they now” film. Instead, it’s a sometimes playful meditation on memory, reality, and forgetting. Ultimately, it’s not just about the encounters. It’s about Sachs herself, and who she is and has been, as a person and a filmmaker.
As the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) writes, through her “warm, contemplative voice-over and playful visual invention, Sachs weaves countless faces and voices into a patchwork of connections. These encounters—whether forgotten or remembered, faint or vivid—have become part of her being.”
“[In] a collage of words, sounds and images, Sachs lays bare onscreen her own uncertainty, foibles and vulnerabilities.” —Lauren Wissot, Filmmaker Magazine
“[This] essay on memory and responsibility touches on moral ambiguity without resorting to sensationalism. Sachs reveals her strength: she captures beauty in the mundane, elevates the casual to poetry, and shows that even the most fleeting encounter leaves a lasting legacy.” —Martijn Smit, Cinemagazine
“A marvelous, totally distinctive film, and just purely fascinating. So many documentary filmmakers are too literal– the image must exactly match what the narration or the interviewer is saying. [Sachs] expands our mind in a really interesting way where we have to think about the visual and what we’re hearing.” —Matt Carey, Deadline
“Some filmmakers are known for their documentary works. Others for their narrative films. Still others—the better filmmakers (for me), generally—do not fit comfortably into either category. Or any category whatsoever. Poet / artist / filmmaker Lynne Sachs is one of the latter…. What is evident—from not just this film but all of [her] work—is that [she’s] very interested in making the seams of filmmaking fairly apparent in Every Contact Leaves a Trace. Clearly, within the structure, [she] introduces a whole array of possibilities.” —Jonathan Marlow, Hammer to Nail
“If Sachs begins from the business cards as her archive of traces, then, by the end she relinquishes the thinness of their description to the irreducible complexity of the people and relationships they represent.” —Delaney Holton, Screen Slate
“For those willing to look — and just as importantly, listen — Every Contact Leaves a Trace will leave an indelible mark, asking important, open-ended questions about life, art, and mortality.” —Mel Valentin, ScreenAnarchy
“Lynne Sachs’ latest film is another wonderful addition to her long body of perceptive, funny and warm feminist-informed explorations of creativity, memory, seriality and politics.” —Herbert Gambill, Mystery Catalogue
Select Accolades
An intimate look at the Catonsville Nine who on May 17, 1968 walked into a Catonsville, Maryland draft board office, grabbed hundreds of selective service records and incinerated them with homemade napalm.
Lynne Sachs | 2001 | 45 minutes | Color | English
A portrait of a doctor who saw the worst of society and ran.
Lynne Sachs | 2015 | 37 minutes | Color | English
The core of this haunting meditation on war, land, the Bible, and filmmaking is a portrait of Revital Ohayon, an Israeli filmmaker and mother killed near the West Bank.
Lynne Sachs | 2015 | 63 minutes | Color | English
When two American sisters travel north from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi, conversations with Vietnamese strangers and friends reveal to them the flip side of a shared history.
Lynne Sachs | 2015 | 33 minutes | Color
